Worldictionary – Instant Translation App For Your iPhone

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This is another interesting app which I’ve tested. Called the Worldictionary, it’s an instant language translation app for the iPhone where all you need to do is view the word through your iPhone camera and it’ll translate it word by word on the fly. You need to be connected either through WIFI or 3G to use this app though as it looks through the database of words.

I must say I’m rather impressed and it’s an indispensable tool if you travel a lot to places where you are not familiar with the language. There’s up to 21 different languages to be translated between one another so you can have for example English to Malay or from Chinese to Japanese. Here’s all the different languages available:- Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Germany, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Czech, Slovak, and Romanian.

You can basically scan words from a book, a menu or even a signboard as long as there’s sufficient light. I even wrote down a name in chinese characters and the app manages to recognize and translate it correctly. In the camera screen, you’ll be able to see a history list of the words you’ve scanned and if you click on it you’ll be brought to a more detailed meaning of the word. You can even learn more about the word through Wikipedia and even relevant videos of it from Youtube. For any word that you wish to come back to in future, you can even bookmark it. That’s a good way to learn a new language too.

I would highly recommend this app for frequent travelers and for those who just wants to learn a new language through foreign words they encounter.